I am encountering an issue while installing Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Express Edition. The installation fails with the following error: Product: SQL Server 2022 Express Edition Operating System: Windows (please specify your version) Error Code: -20618936

The gist of this error message is that SQL Server did not start when Setup wanted to run post-configuration. There can be multiple reasons for this. The by far most common reason is a known issue where Windows reports a disk sector size that SQL Server is not able to cope with. To verify that you are victim to this problem, you should look in the SQL Server error log which you find in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL16.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\LOG\ERRORLOG and look for a message that talks about 256 misaligned log IOs.

Microsoft has published the article Troubleshoot SQL Server errors related to system disk sector size greater than 4 KB which discusses workarounds for this problem. Basically, you need to make the registry edit described in the article. Very important! You need to reboot Windows for the change to take effect.

If you don't find the message about 256 misaligned log IOs, please upload the ERRORLOG so that we can take a look. (You will need to rename it to ERRORLOG.txt for the forum software to accept it.)